Category: minutiae

I hope everyone had a nice Halloween. As I mentioned earlier, I did not dress up this year, so here is a throwback to my 1980s childhood. My brother, on the right, made a stellar cardboard robot. I was just planning on being a generic princess (dig that tin foil crown!), but at some point my dad picked up a gorilla mask and I latched onto it. Gorilla Princess was born.

We lived in Massachusetts at the time, so Halloween night was COLD. I’m probably wearing snowpants under that dress, and my brother’s wearing a winter coat and giant mittens. A costume that involved some level of head covering was a good idea, so the mask helped to keep me warm. But what I had not considered was that it would severely impede my ability to eat candy along our route. I had to make the choice: awesome mask or candy. In a move that eventually paralleled my cosplaying attitude, I chose to make the candy sacrifice rather than jeopardize The Look.

2016 was a quieter Halloween. Last night I went over to the Corgi Sisters’ house and helped hand out candy to the legions of trick-or-treaters who came by. (I think there may have been a dozen in all.) Their poor dog was Seriously Not Into It. But she looked cute!

Well, another October has rolled around in another year where I’ve been just awful about writing. I haven’t written anything since my layout broke back in April. So I thought I’d give the ol’ Blogtober challenge another try. I went back and read through my entries from last year. Obviously it’s not great writing, but there’s some fun stuff in there. I probably won’t extend it into November this time, since I’m going to the East Coast mid-month for a combined wedding and Thanksgiving trip. I won’t have my laptop with me and I am not a fan of typing on a tablet.

I am currently MASSIVELY jetlagged from a trip to Amsterdam. I was there for two weeks, just got back on the 29th. I decided to try and tackle the jetlag this year by leaning in and just going with it. Sleep when I’m sleepy and be awake when I’m awake. Of course, that has meant that today I slept from 3pm to 8pm. Last night I woke up at 11:30pm and made a curry at 2am. It’s been a wild ride. I’ll probably go back to bed as soon as I post this.

(It was this curry, btw. Over the summer I froze leftover buttermilk and then forgot I had it in storage so I bought more. So I have far too much in the freezer. I am slowly working my way through the backlog. I think I have about four cups left. Thing is, frozen buttermilk tends to separate, so the resulting curries have been a little less than superlative in texture. They’re still tasty, but I wouldn’t serve them to a guest. More for me!)

Unlike last year, I haven’t really thought about this ahead of time, so I don’t have a list of topics already planned out. I’ve gone on two trips to Europe this year (Italy in March, the Netherlands in September), so those will hopefully yield decent content. I may just be reposting my Instagram photos and providing more backstory. I guess what I’m saying is that there may be more soap-quality posts this year.

A while back, I was making a Sephora order and needed something small to get me up to free shipping. At the time, Pacifica was getting discontinued, so I was able to pick up a travel bottle of their blood orange body wash for like $3. The first time I opened it up in the shower I basically wanted to eat the soap. It smells so amazingly orangey.

Fast forward five years or so, I have tried several products in their blood orange line, and the body wash and body butter are my favorites. The spray perfume I use occasionally, but it doesn’t last very long and it’s somehow missing the mouthwatering aspect that is very present in the wash and lotion. The bar soap I don’t really like, it leaves my skin feeling somewhat uncomfortable. (I think it may be that glycerin soaps just don’t agree with me.)

(Haha, the dreaded soap post strikes! I wanted to write about my family’s creamed onion recipe, but the only photos I have are are terrible—they’re from 2012, taken on my old-old phone. I’ll have to wait until Thanksgiving to take new ones.)

Tonight I went over to Pikacello and Hoshikaji’s house for dinner. During the course of the evening the conversation turned to music. I am an occasional oboe player, while Pikacello is a professional cellist and Hoshikaji is a violinist. I happened to mention one Jan Dismas Zelenka, my favorite baroque composer, and before I knew it, I was fetching my oboe so that we could sight-read his third trio sonata. AND GOSH IT WAS FUN.

Back in college, I played the first trio sonata (two oboes, bassoon, and continuo). Man, that was an amazing experience. There’s this stretch in the second movement in the first oboe part where you can’t breathe for like a minute. It’s so good. I seriously loved playing for stuff like that. (Someday I will regale you all with my tale of Pasculli cadenzas, but that day is not today.)